I see him. He is walking, fast, head down, towards the place I am standing and waiting. I've been seeing him like this almost every Saturday - sometimes more days, other days - for the past two years now. It's felt like a hot minute since we met but we've been seeing and knowing each other for Years now and that plural 's' at the end of time stands for Us. Me and my Godless Man.
He says he doesn't know God, which is funny because in all my twenty-one (almost twenty-two) years of existing I have never been brought so close to my God as I have since we started dating. He doesn't know God face to face yet, but I see my creator in him. In those moments when he thinks my eyes are on something else entirely. Through the sex and the guilt and the tears and the truth, we've got our little bit of Godness here. And I see that Godness in my Godless Man, I do. I do.
Our eyes start opening a few months in: the room is bright, warm and colourless. I like it here, do you? Yes, okay, shall we stay? Yes, okay. Sometimes we want to leave the room but find it is too difficult, too complicated now-- and that is mostly when we are more than minds apart. I think, often, of what one life would be like without the other, and I talk with him and with Him about this. Manageable, just as good most of the time, but wholly undesirable. And I think about why I have found this. Why I would choose him to be the one I am equal to for the rest of my life. And I think about who I know he is. Who brought me to a God he says he doesn't even know. Who watched me change like a chameleon under a dancing prism; who sat close by to see all of the colours, bright, dark, dull and darker still. Who stepped out of the shade to dance under the prism with me. He is showing me all of his precious colours too. Yes, we met dancing under the colours. We are still dancing, sometimes holding sweaty hands, (often) stepping on each other's toes, bumping heads as we lean to yell into each other over the loudness. But these are the best ways I can put us as we are now. What we're doing. Walking and standing and waiting and seeing and knowing and dancing. Still dancing. slowing . danc ing.
This Love that has come to us has not been what I expected. And when I sit far away from all the things our lives have come to be, that is when I can see it best. Up close, it is personal and it can sometimes be as beautiful and ugly and complicated as a series of barely-connected vignettes. I don't know, but it has been fun trying to put words to us again. It's wonderful and so terrifying not to know into which New Present we will be emerging. But I have faith in things ahead of us, and I see you do too. But I also have faith in the God ahead of us, and I see you might too. one day my love,
s
